Bryant Park Moratorium Rally (1969)

Experimental composer's uninterrupted 50-minute chronicle of an October 1969 Manhattan protest rally-- both live and as it was covered by the TV media.

In 1969, experimental composer and artist Tony Conrad was living in midtown Manhattan, just down 42nd street from Bryant Park. On October 15 of that year a rally was held in the park as part of the nationwide Moratorium protest against the Vietnam War, and Conrad, in a moment of inspired wit, began rolling audio tape in his loft. Directing one microphone out the window towards the rally, and another towards a television broadcasting live coverage of the event, Conrad was able to create this strange, often fascinating document by combining these parallel currents of media and reality.

Containing a single, uninterrupted 50-minute chronicle of the day's events, Bryant Park Moratorium Rally bears more relation to Conrad's subsequent career as a video artist and media scholar (and SUNY-Buffalo professor) than to his work as a musician. Although the piece-- despite a constant barrage of car horns, police sirens and generalized crowd noise-- does reveal a certain hushed beauty in its steady, muffled tide of amassed human activity, this slice of audio verité could only be classified as music by the most indiscriminate avant-garde definition.

On its most immediate level, the piece functions as an entertaining, occasionally instructive, cultural time capsule. Considering the circumstances and stakes, the rally itself often proves to be a markedly congenial affair. In addition to eloquent anti-war speeches from the likes of Eugene McCarthy and the Rev. William Sloan Coffin, the program also featured the rather inconsequential presence of a stageful of Broadway actors ("Miss Helen Hayes...Eli Wallach...Ben Gazzara!") Meanwhile, the TV coverage includes brief interviews with such notables as Dick Cavett (interviewer: "Do you believe in this Moratorium day program?" Cavett: "I think it's kind of been poorly defined what it's about.") and Woody Allen ("I think it's obviously proved already that it is working, has already worked, and will work even more as the next few days go by.")

As illustrated by these various speeches and live interviews, one the most remarkable things about these recordings is the fact that the audio from the TV broadcast reaches Conrad's microphones sooner (and considerably more intelligibly) than the actual sounds produced outside his window. This delay not only creates a disorienting split between the album's dual channels, but also raises the rather uncomfortable notion that, at least from Conrad's vantage point, the Moratorium rally could be argued to have been more effectual as a media event than as a live one. Of course, the effects of this captured TV footage are amplified by the astonishing concentration of the newscast's live coverage, which consists of the type of continuous, uncut feed that is now essentially extinct-- outside of the odd C-SPAN broadcast-- in our current age of the 10-second sound byte.

Far murkier, however, is the impact of Bryant Park Moratorium Rally as a political instrument. Conrad originally made this recording available as a free mp3 on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it's unclear what new insights this piece truly provides for today's listeners and/or activists. At a time when 24-hour news channels routinely feature on-air anchors sitting at their computers reading e-mails and blogs aloud, the idea that the media filters and distorts our political reality surely seems a rather obvious one. And though this record does provide an engaging window through which we can witness a crucial sliver of our recent history, it's a portal that grows smaller and cloudier with each successive listen.